Japan - Day 14

We began today in a plane somewhere over Asia. You have to pay separately to rent portable entertainment units on Jetstar, and I'm so glad I did as it managed to keep me fairly well occupied throughout the sleepless night. Sometime early in the morning the itching on my foot became so unbearable that I went and tried to wash my foot again in the toilet. This was logistically rather difficult.

We spent an hour in Brisbane before hopping on another plane to Christchurch. Exhaustion took over at this stage and I spent the flight in some sort of freaky dreamland. I vaguely remember eating some Pringles, but that's about it. At least I was too out of it to notice my foot. I did notice as we landed though, and was desperate to collect our luggage and get at that cream. But no, it didn't turn out that way.

We weren't in any hurry so we weren't too concerned as we watched all the other passengers grabbing their bags and walking away. But once the luggage carosel ground to a halt it quickly became apparent that our bags would not be joining us in Christchurch. This is my third time losing luggage so I'm an old pro now at finding the luggage counter and filling in the forms. The other times my bags went missing were in Rome and Budapest, so it was nice not to have a communication barrier thrown in this time.

We had three and a half hours to fill in before our flight to Auckland, and it was actually kind of nice not to have to drag suitcases around. After lunch I marched into the pharmacy to get some cream for my foot, and then marched straight back out again when I saw the price.

It was dark by the time we arrived in Auckland. For some reason, which completely escapes me now, we decided to walk over to the international terminal to get a shuttle bus home. Perhaps we thought a walk would wake us up a bit. It turned out to be a mistake as there were no shuttles there due to the fact that there were no international flights arriving for another couple of hours. So off we went, back to the domestic terminal, feeling rather silly. After 24 hours on the move we were more than ready for it all to be over, but we were lucky enough to be the only people on the shuttle and got home in record time.